Anthony Hecht, 81; Confronted Brutality Through Visual Verse

By Jon Thurber

Oct. 23, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Anthony Hecht, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work confronted the brutality of his time in a voice praised for its unique music and visual perception, has died. He was 81.

Hecht died Wednesday at his home in Washington, D.C., according to his wife, Helen. He was diagnosed over the summer with lymphoma and declined rapidly, she said.

A formalist who wrote in meter, rhyme and stanza at a time when most poets had turned to free verse, Hecht has been compared favorably to W.H. Auden and Robert Frost. He published on an irregular basis, producing nine collections of verse, but belying the notion that poetry is a young person’s game, he published five of those volumes after age 50. He also wrote essays and criticism, including a well-received book-length study of Auden’s work.

Dana Gioia, poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, called Hecht “a magisterial senior presence in American poetry.”

“He created musical surfaces to talk about dark themes like war, abandonment and cruelty. He had the power to take the darkest subjects and make them beautiful, and in the process you were compelled to look at your deepest fears.”

Timothy Steele, a poet and professor at Cal State Los Angeles, said Hecht “wrote about the horrors and follies of 20th century history in a readily accessible manner. His work refers to complex questions of history and art, but at the same time it addresses the intelligent lay reader. It is not just poetry for specialists.”

As a poet, Hecht questioned the state of humanity in the face of what he termed “much casual death.” And he did so in a powerful and dignified manner that rejected emotionalism without rejecting feeling.

“Hecht’s poetry doesn’t have the qualities of invective or outrage. He states and evokes in the most hauntingly elegant language, he freezes the horror of the situation,” said Robert Faggen, a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

“Hecht’s love of poetic form and language was a search for a hidden law in a lawless world,” Faggen said. “The stark contrast between the elegance of his craft and the horrors it embraced created haunting tension and biting irony.”

Hecht won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968 for his second collection, “The Hard Hours.” He also received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1983), the Wallace Stevens Award (1999) and the 1997 Tanning Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets for lifetime achievement.

He was also the first American poet to deliver the prestigious Mellon lectures (1992) at the National Gallery of Art.

He also served as the consultant on poetry for the Library of Congress, the post now referred to as the nation’s poet laureate, from 1982 to 1984.

Hecht was also an accomplished translator of Aeschylus, Goethe and Joseph Brodsky.

Poet Deborah Gregor, a judge for the Tanning citation, wrote that Hecht “is our great wry moralist. Among the poets of his generation he has been a moral conscience, and his poems have taken as dark subjects the war and the Holocaust when most people have abandoned them.”

Hecht, the son of a stockbroker, was born in New York City. His family had German-Jewish roots, and he would recall his childhood as unhappy. He began writing verse in high school but did not then view poetry as his calling. He graduated from Horace Mann, a prep school in the Bronx, where he was a friend and classmate of Jack Kerouac. He went on to Bard College, but his studies were interrupted by World War II. He served in the Army in Europe, and his unit was among those that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The deprivation, cruelty and death that Hecht saw there would mark him for life. With his spare knowledge of German and French, he was assigned to translate for prisoners -- and later for their captured guards -- as they recounted their stories of life in the camp.

After the war, Hecht enrolled in Kenyon College and studied with the poet John Crowe Ransom, who first published some of Hecht’s work in the Kenyon Review. While at Kenyon he also began his teaching career, which would take him to a number of universities throughout his life.

Hecht’s first volume of poetry, “A Summoning of Stones,” was published to great acclaim in 1954.

Writing in the Hudson Review, critic Joseph Bennett noted that “a Baroque exuberance characterizes Hecht’s poetry.... Echoes of [Wallace] Stevens give way to language considered purely for itself.”

His second book, “The Hard Hours,” was published 14 years later and won the Pulitzer. Writing in the Yale Review, Laurence Lieberman noted that “in contrast with the ornate style of many of Hecht’s earlier poems, the new work is characterized by starkly undecorative -- and unpretentious -- writing.”

In the film series “The Poet’s View,” created by the Academy of American Poets, Hecht described his process of writing:

“When I sit down to write a poem, I use a pad and a pen ... sometimes a pencil, but never a computer. I don’t own a computer and don’t know how to operate one. My handwriting is not good, so I often need to transcribe as quickly as possible from a handwritten version to a typewritten version, lest I come back to the poem the next day, unable to decipher my own hand. But I normally only get a certain amount, a little bit of a poem written in a single day. This is a slow, laborious process, but one that is ultimately satisfying if the poem turns out to be any good.”

Hecht is perhaps most identified for the tragic historical vision of poems such as “More Light! More Light!,” “Rites and Ceremonies” and “The Book of Yolek,” but he could also be wickedly funny in his writing. One of his best-known poems is “The Dover Bitch,” a parody of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” considered one of the great poems in the English language. Hecht’s piece is more than amusing parody; it is a very funny commentary on Arnold’s work.

Those who knew him used such words as “elegant,” “charming” and “witty” to describe Hecht. Gioia said that there was “no glimmer on the surface of the sorrows he had seen and experienced.”

“Hecht’s career demonstrated in an experimental age that it was still possible to write great poetry in rhyme and meter,” Gioia said.

“One wants to feel in control,” Hecht said of his work in an interview with the New York Times last year. “If you are writing in free verse, what makes it a poem? A number of my contemporaries wrote in free verse, but it became random jottings from their minds. Some enjoyed a period of celebrity. I don’t think they are going to be read very long. It’s as if someone says, ‘I thought of a butterfly,’ and it becomes a poem because it’s sanctioned by their own brilliance.”

Last April, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his “Collected Later Poems,” an assemblage of 25 years of work.

“He takes with him a sense of grandeur and nobility of purpose that so much of contemporary poetry lacks,” poet J.D. McClatchy told The Times on Friday. “He wrote with a concern for the sumptuous texture of the poetry, but his work was always in service to a deeper, moral purpose.”

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Evan of New York City; two children by his first marriage, Jason of North Hampton, Mass., and Adam of North Bend, Ore.; and two grandchildren.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

‘More Light! More Light!’

Composed in the Tower before his execution

These moving verses, and being brought at that time

Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:

“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”

Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,

The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.

His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap

Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.

And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;

Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;